Best review ever?

The Browser says that this review is "arguably the best review ever. Certainly of 'War Horse', as filmed by Steven Spielberg. Possibly of any film. Or indeed anything else." (Via.)

You may decide for yourself; if you are lucky, I think, you will be able to decide without seeing the movie.

Personally, the best movie review I've ever read is this one. But then, I actually had to take my kid to see Transformers 2, so I had a lot of mental trauma to heal.

Annals of faint appellate praise

The conflict of punitive damages law perceived by the chancellor was a false one. However, he cured his mistake by torturing the choice of law rules to yield the same result.

Valley Forge Ins. Co. v. Strickland, 620 So. 2d 535, 539 (Miss. 1993).

QOTD

One must live and write restlessly, with the help of the new reserves that life offers. I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one’s slant accordingly - at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me - it’s a lack of humility.

-- Boris Pasternak, interviewed by the Paris Review

The appellate equivalent of three and out

Two months after the Bad Argument Day we noted, the SCOTUS reverses a murder conviction based on a Brady violation by the Orleans Parish D.A.'s office.

The only slightly remarkable thing is that it was 8-1 not 9-0, but Justice Thomas could not bring himself to vote to reverse. The op by Roberts makes short work (barely 4 pages) of that:

The State and the dissent advance various reasons why the jury might have discounted Boatner’s undisclosed statements. They stress, for example, that Boatner made other remarks on the night of the murder indicating that he could identify the first gunman to enter the house, but not the others. That merely leaves us to speculate about which of Boatner’s contradictory declarations the jury would have believed. The State also contends that Boatner’s statements made five days after the crime can be explained by fear of retaliation. Smith responds that the record contains no evidence of any such fear. Again, the State’s argument offers a reason that the jury could have disbelieved Boatner’s undisclosed statements, but gives us no confidence that it would have done so.

Scene from the Superdome

Takin' it home to Tuscaloosa.

... First ever shutout in a BCS bowl, let alone championship. Okla. State # 2?

I didn't think it could get less exciting than their last game. I was wrong.

Big fuckin' deals!

From "Osaka's Shinsaibashi Shopping Street." Language Log, via Volokhia.

Déjà vu all over again

Barbour pardons a wife-killer ... didn't that already happen? Several times?

(H/t J.L.)

What is this Lion doing?

Missing a tackle, apparently.

Poppies and cornflowers

Here is a poem from 1913 by Gottfried Benn, a physician whose poetry drew heavily on his work:

Before a cornfield he said:
The fabled fidelity of cornflowers
is a fine motif for women painters,
but I prefer the profound opera of the poppy.
It makes you think of blood clots and menstruation.
Of suffering, spitting up, going hungry, kicking the bucket—
in short: of the murky path of man.

And here is "Poppies in October" from Plath's Ariel, a poem she wrote the same day as "Ariel" itself:

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers?

Leaving aside the evident appeal that Benn ("brutal honesty of an unprecedented perception," said Walter Kaufmann of his work) would have for Plath, I am not buying an accidental juxtaposition of poppies and cornflowers in her poem. I'm pretty sure she had at least a reading knowledge of German. And that stunning image of the woman in the ambulance is comparable to some of Benn's early poems about his morgue work.

The preference for poppies over cornflowers is evident in both poems; Benn spells out what they represent, which is less explicit in Plath's poem, where the hue and emotion of the poppies is contrasted with a dullness of both color and soul. To the extent that Benn's poem echoes in Plath's, there's her rejection of being a "mere" woman artist in favor of the male "path" (tho how Benn appropriates menstruation for men is a great mystery indeed).

The temporal juxtaposition to "Ariel" fits into that male/female tension:

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

As often noted, this passage "rhymes" with the part of The Bell Jar where Buddy's mother says "What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from," and Esther thinks to herself that she wants to be the arrow instead.

(Wikiquote reminds me of another poppy passage, also in The Bell Jar:

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

Plath finished The Bell Jar in August 1961 and wrote "Ariel" and "Poppies in October" in 1962; she reuses lots of images in her poetry and prose in this time, a reminder of how short her active career was.)

Corporations are people too, if you don't know how to read

Brad DeLong convenes a symposium of Edward Coke, John of Salisbury, Thrasymachus, and Justinian to discuss how "person" in the 14th Amendment came to be construed as including corporations.

Justinian: So if you have more corporations in your state, you get more representatives in the legislature?

John of Salisbury: No, no, no! "Persons" in Section 2 refers only to human beings...

Edward Coke: And "persons" at the start of Section 1 refers only to human beings...

John of Salisbury: Only "persons" at the end of Section 1 refers to legal persons, i.e. corporations, as well as human beings...

More at the link, including the "invisible ink" theory of legislative intent.

The GOP: Looking out for the 1%

Kevin Drum presents charts from the Tax Policy Center, assessing the tax relief proposed by Romney, Gingrich, Cain (remember him?), and Perry. You will be surprised to see who gets the lion's share of the relief.

Okay, I lied. You weren't surprised at all, were you? But really, I *was* surprised: tax rates *decline* for millionaires as compared to those eking it out on $200K or $500K a year? Pretty egregious.

As Drum notes, Romney's plan lamentably fails: it's not generous towards the lower/middle classes, while coming nowhere near the giveaways to Mr. Moneybags offered by his rivals. But since he's Romney, I'm sure he will have another position to offer.

Talk to the sock puppet

The unclever and unethical Lee Siegel, whose sock-puppetry on his own comment threads got him suspended from The New Republic, has acquired a gig at the NYRB, attesting to its declining standards.

In the linked post, his thesis is that Marilyn Monroe's sexuality is some sort of secret that's been covered up. No, not like "she's a lesbian" sexuality; I mean as in being sexy, liking sex, etc. No really, that's his point. Yes, that Marilyn Monroe.

For fun, you can look at the comments and try to guess which Siegel posted himself. "A truly fascinating piece. Thought provoking and unexpected in many ways"? But probably not this one: "Wow. Lee Siegel, the first writer to notice that Marilyn Monroe was sexy."

(My comment drawing readers' attention to the Reason story linked above did not meet the high standards set by the NYRB's moderator.)

... I'd forgotten this great ObWi post by Hilzoy, which casts some light on Siegel's erotic daydreaming about Monroe: a relatively healthy obsession, by comparison.

Train wreck in the Orange Bowl

West Virginia's 70-33* massacre of Clemson last night was like a train wreck: I couldn't look away from the horrible sight.

Between 13:25 and 0:04 in the 2d quarter, WV scored five touchdowns. I wonder whether any other team, college or pro, has scored five TDs (or more!) in fewer than 13:21.

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*Note: it wasn't that close.

... NFL record in one quarter is four TDs, but that's one player (WR Don Hutson in 1945).

The 1987 Redskins scored 5 TDs in the 2d quarter of Super Bowl XXII against the hapless Broncos; that's a Super Bowl record, but I can't find a TDs/quarter record for the NFL generally, or for the NCAA.

The myth of Apple's design brilliance

Item: any cell phone that realistically *requires* one to buy a $15 plastic film to cover its glass face - a film that is devilishly difficult to apply correctly - is not, in fact, a well-designed cell phone.

Lilla on conservativism

Mark Lilla objects to Corey Robin's The Conservative Mind as conflating distinct categories or axes of thought, most conspicuously "conservative" and "reactionary." Good stuff.

What we have not seen much of, except on the fringes of American politics, are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos. At least until now.

The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. This has been brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, but in the past four years, thanks to the right-wing media establishment and economic collapse, it has reached a wider public and transformed the Republican Party. How that happened would be a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology.

... Yglesias links to a critique* of Lilla's review, and himself poses a test question: if Lilla is right and Robin wrong, then why is low taxes for the super-rich the cornerstone of the GOP platform? (My metaphor, not Y's: do platforms *have* cornerstones?)

And the story here seems to be very much in line with Robin's framework. High income individuals have never been excited about progressive income taxation, and over the past few decades they've mobilized politically against it. At the same time, income inequality has grown and over the past 10-15 years it's grown very specifically with a concentration in the hands of a very small number of people. Naturally, in a political democracy if "the one percent" end up with a larger and larger share of national resources you're going to see a coalition mobilize to try to take those resources for various purposes. The richer the one percent get, the more attractive they become as a target and the more they counter-mobilize on behalf of their own interests. And conservatives in American politics today are largely united by a decision to embrace the one percent's side of the argument.

A blog debate between Lilla and Robin would be useful.

(Also, if I'm not mistaken, Slate pays someone to proofread Yglesias's blog posts. Good idea.)

... Sheri Berman also regrets Robin's book, and points out something so obvious that we forget to notice it:

The questions Robin and his ideological confreres should really be asking themselves is why the contemporary left has been so bad at this, particularly in contrast to the contemporary right. Why, in an era of extreme unemployment, rising inequality and social dislocation, is it the right rather than the left that generated a movement like the Tea Party? Why are mass protests railing against tax increases rather than demanding more progressive and activist government?

Indeed. The ability of the GOP to mobilize voters *against* their economic interests is masterful.

(I don't think Occupy Wall Street etc. are really counterexamples; how many OWS candidates are there for public office? Sixties-style "protests" play into the opposition's hands, is my fear.)

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* Call me a sissy, but I would refuse to subscribe to a magazine that uses a guillotine victim as its promo art, even if it is called Jacobin. That's just despicable.